Why Arvind Kejriwal Should Drop the Cap

When Team Anna disbanded last month, anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare and his chief lieutenant, Arvind Kejriwal, took different paths: Mr. Kejriwal announced his foray into electoral politics while Mr. Hazare made it clear he’d stay out of them.

Mr. Kejriwal’s transition to politics was accompanied by a styled change: a Gandhi cap started appearing with greater frequency on his head.

He had plenty of occasions to display it in recent weeks as he went public with a string of high-profile accusations, including against Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Congress party President Sonia Gandhi and Law Minister Salman Khurshid. Both men have denied any wrongdoing.

Popularized by Mahatma Gandhi as a symbol of India’s struggle for independence from colonial rule, the white side cap made a comeback last year thanks to Mr. Hazare, a white-clothed, self-styled Gandhian. During Mr. Hazare’s anti-corruption hunger strikes, the cap was widely sported by his supporters, who called for the establishment of a strong anti-corruption agency.

Until recently, Mr. Kejriwal rarely wore one. This changed as he laid out his vision for a political party earlier this month, drawing heavily from the rhetoric of India’s freedom struggle. The draft vision of his political party, published on the website of India Against Corruption, seeks to redefine the meaning of “swaraj,” or self-rule, as not just a “liberation from colonial rule” but as “rule by the people” – as opposed to that of bureaucrats and established political leaders.

The Gandhi cap, or topi, fits in with this rhetoric. It’s good branding. Mr. Kejriwal’s version of the cap comes with the words “I am the common man.”

However, there are several reasons we believe Mr. Kejriwal should drop it. Here are four of them:

1. The cap cannot replace Anna Hazare. Mr. Hazare has made it clear that, while he is not against Mr. Kejriwal’s political plunge, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. Mr. Hazare said he won’t even allow the party to use his image or his name. Now that the two men have taken different paths, the question is how much of the mass support that Mr. Hazare galvanized during his public fasts last year can translate into potential votes for Mr. Kejriwal. The cap alone won’t do it. In fact, it’s a constant reminder that Mr. Hazare is no longer associated with this part of the movement that he helped launch.

2. Kejriwal is no Gandhian. The cap made sense for Anna Hazare, a self-style Gandhian who embraced the freedom fighter’s tactics of nonviolent protests as well as his austere lifestyle, making a name for himself by turning his home village into a model of development. While Mr. Kejriwal has adopted some of these forms of protest, he stands for a more modern, urban kind of activism. Something more forward-looking than the topi would make more sense.

3. It’s a symbol of old, not new, politics. With their entry into politics, Mr. Kejriwal and his group say they want to bring dramatic change to India’s political landscape. Then why take up as one of their symbols the Gandhi cap, which over the years has also become a symbol of India’s old political order? This is a point also made by Shailaja Bajpai, who wrote in the Indian Express that the white Gandhi topi “makes him look like a bureaucrat pretending to be a politician.”

4. It clashes. Not just with the spirit of his movement-turned-party but also with his shirts. While the side cap works with Mr. Hazare’‘s all-white-cotton look, it doesn’t go as well with Mr. Kejriwal’s style, which is more fitting with his bureaucratic past than with his new political avatar. Perhaps Mr. Kejriwal is taking a gradual approach to his transformation into an Indian politician and he’ll eventually look something like this:

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